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Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

The question of where life originated will have no good answer until we figure out how to create life from basic components. We still don't know how to do that yet.

Yes, Urey and Miller showed that you could get simple organic molecules by passing an electric charge through gasses thought to be present around the early Earth.

But going from low molecular weight inputs to life is a vastly different problem. You could think of it as the most complicated bootstrapping problem in the universe.

Nobody has managed to do it in the lab, either. What can't be built from scratch can't be understood very well, and therein lies the problem.

If we had a stepwise procedure for building a self-replicating, self-feeding organism of any level of complexity from base components, we would know exactly what to look for.

Until then, the idea of sending a DNA amplifier to Mars isn't a bad fallback position.

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There has been progress within the theory of non equilibrium thermodynamics which hint that local entropy decrease is baked into the physics. That is to say life just kind of falls out of the physics of thermodynamic systems of a certain type. That certain type being anything that dissipates a source of energy. Personally I think abiogenesis is relatively easy and there is large scale panspermia going on. The universe is like a yoghurt, bacteria everywhere and novel abiogenic origins occurring all over the place, although there are probably dominant kinds of life. DNA based being one.

If we succeed, it would be the most important breakthrough in the history of humanity, and would have very deep existential implications. It wouldn't definitely rule out a supreme being as the creator of the universe we live in, but it would make the gap between us and that being much smaller than millions of people on earth believe now.

> would have very deep existential implications.

I doubt that.

> It wouldn't definitely rule out a supreme being as the creator of the universe we live in

Yes, that's exactly what the believers will tell you even then.

Think about it: the science knows today that every atom in our bodies is either produced 13.8 billion years ago (is it is H2) or in the explosion of some star. It's true for every element that you learn in the chemistry class. We know that the Earth is 4.7 billion years old. And we already know that humans share 99% percent of the DNA with chimps. And that 0.006 billion years ago on the Earth neither humans nor chimps existed, but their common ancestor.

Do people who believe in a "miracle" divine intervention that supposedly happened only some 0.000002 billion years ago (or even only 0.0000014 billion years ago) when only at that point their deity became involved with the believers, do these people in anyway feel affected by all that? No.

Compared to what we know today, their religious "messages from the deity" obviously prove that they were written by plain humans of older times, because these messages don't contain any knowledge we have today, but instead the "eternal" truths like "at the end of the day the Sun sets in the muddy pond" or that the Earth's sky is a solid dome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament#Biblical_use

Do the believers feel affected by that? No.

Um. That's been done? In several ways? Replacing parts of existing life with different elements (arsenic?). Hand-crafting a genetic code from parts of existing creatures, to create entirely new and different creatures. There's even a company in the town next to me (IDT) that delivers to-order DNA samples via fedex anywhere in the world.

To me that's more like splicing PC components into a Macbook Pro. It doesn't prove or explain how they both evolved from a Tandy computer.

Its like, building your own computer entirely from parts. One that never existed before.

And anyway, I call No True Scotsman. When is it 'really, really creating life'? If making something that lives, eats and reproduces from parts is not 'making life' then what?

I just meant to point out, the old tired philosophy issue of 'Until we can create life, God still has primacy' is out of date.

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